Business leaders could be more honest about how customer experience (CX) is having a bit of an identity crisis.
After studying as widely as possible the views of CX leaders across industries — from retail and banking to healthcare and energy — one thing is clear: everyone’s talking about AI, but few are convinced it’s the silver bullet.
Experts have spent years promising hyper-personalisation, seamless omnichannel journeys, and virtual agents that feel human. Yet, what is the reality? Chatbots still frustrate customers, email support is painfully slow, and customer feedback aggregation is a mess. Complicated customer issues are more complicated to resolve than ever. The dream of AI-powered CX is still more aspiration than execution even as Agentic AI promises to amazing results.
The AI Paradox
AI is everywhere in CX strategy commentary. It’s being used to:
– Front-end customer journeys
– Automate responses
– Draft email responses in real time
– Recommend next-best actions
– Listen in to customer service reps
– Reduce fraud.
But there is a paradox: while AI promises efficiency, it often erodes the very human touch that defines great CX. Customers often want fast service, yes — but on many occasions they also want empathy, clarity, and connection. And when AI fails to deliver that, it’s not just a tech failure — it’s a brand failure. And brand remains the key long-term differentiator for most organisations.
One insurance contact centre leader I interviewed summed it up perfectly: “Our customers don’t want to talk to computers. They don’t.”
Omnichannel Chaos
The omnichannel dream is still just that — a dream. Leaders are struggling to stitch together customer journeys across phone, chat, email, social media, and in-store interactions. The result? Fragmented experiences and perplexed customers.
One exec we interviewed described the challenge of chat concurrency: while agents juggle multiple chats, customers sit waiting, feeling ignored. Another lamented the inability to track customer history across channels — a basic expectation in today’s digital world.
Feedback Overload, Insight Underload
We’re drowning in feedback — NPS scores, CSAT, customer effort, call centre analytics, social listening, surveys. But how to make sense of it all? Investment in key resources that provide frequent valuable insights are restricted.
CX teams are overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of data. Aggregating it meaningfully to identify themes and take action is still a work in progress. And with AI increasingly driving invisible CX (eg automated recommendations and digital twins), auditing what’s actually being delivered to customers (‘What was their individual customer journey like?’), is becoming vital. Particularly in regulated industries such as financial services.
The Human Factor
One of the most striking themes is the role of frontline employees. They’re the face of CX — yet some feel unsupported, undertrained, and burnt out. They face frustrated customers more and more. Leaders are calling for better tools, faster onboarding, and more attention to mental health.
But we know happy employees lead to happy customers. It’s not just a feel-good mantra — it’s a proven brand success driver.
CX is often touted as a strategic priority. But behind the scenes, leaders can feel it’s underfunded and undervalued. There’s also a governance gap. CX is an organisation-wide challenge, yet too often it’s siloed. Unless every leader sees themselves as a CX owner and every employee is empowered to act as a CX owner, progress will be inconsistent.
Agentic AI
Will Agentic AI be the answer? Who really knows. CX isn’t struggling because of AI. It’s struggling because we’ve tried to automate empathy, outsource strategy, and measure experience with metrics that don’t tell the full story.
The path forward?
– AI should support humans, not replace them
– Feedback needs to be actionable, not just abundant
– CX must be owned by individuals across the org — not just by one team
– Innovations need to tested fully, not released on a fast fail basis
– Personalisation must be transparent and ethical.
CX is messy, complex, and constantly evolving and any organisations biggest brand driver. But that’s what makes it worth improving.